D. Griffin Jones - page 17

Perhaps you, like many others, would like to move away from Twitter. If you read news, webcomics or blogs, you can follow all the same stuff with an RSS reader. But if you want to follow people in your community and talk to others online with the same interests, there’s a Twitter alternative you may have heard about: Mastodon. It’s a full-blown Twitter clone that a lot of people you may know are moving to.

Recent changes at Twitter did not instill confidence in the platform’s future. That’s about the shortest and most diplomatic way I can summarize the cavalcade of poor decision-making that has trickled down from their new CEO, he-who-shall-not-be-named, Rocket Car Tunnel Guy. It’s the last straw for a lot of people.

Despite the memes you may have seen, signing up for Mastodon isn’t that hard. There are just a few things you need to consider. Let me show you how to use Mastodon.

The Dvorak layout is a different way of arranging the 26 letters on the keyboard. Dvorak puts all of the most common letters right on the center row for increased typing speed. It also balances the most common letters across all ten fingers for reducing strain. Physical Dvorak keyboards have been available for computers forever, but finally, you can get it on your iPhone and iPad. Now, you Dvorak aficionados can have a consistent keyboard across all of your devices.

We all have our favorite news sites, independent blogs or webcomics. A lot of people keep up with new posts on Twitter — it’s where a lot of Cult of Mac traffic comes from. With a mass exodus of Twitter users after you-know-what happened, there’s a way you can still keep up with your favorite sites. It’s a technology that has powered the web for over twenty years called RSS; let me show you can follow the news without Twitter.

Apple’s Weather app for iPhone, iPad and Mac soon will incorporate local news sourced from the Apple News service.

In the latest beta of iOS 16.2, certain cities have an additional section for weather news, slotted between the 10-day forecast and the air quality meter. On iPadOS and macOS Ventura, this section occupies an even larger widget in the corner.

Days after reports of Foxconn employees hopping fences and fleeing from their jobs, a report late Wednesday from Taiwan News says Apple’s biggest iPhone factory is now on “total lockdown.” These new restrictions may have a big impact on Apple’s sales during the crucial holiday period.

Foxconn, whom Apple contracts to manufacture the lion’s share of iPhones, Macs and other Apple products, has had employees stay in on-site dormitories in a “closed-loop system” to prevent COVID outbreaks. Employees have been complaining about the “increasingly unsafe and inhumane working conditions” of the dorms.

It’s taken a while to fully unpack and understand the technical improvements to the cameras in the iPhone 14 Pro. Camera nerd Sebastiaan de With, co-founder and designer of the highly-respected Halide camera app, has written a detailed review of the improvements to the camera system.

His professional opinion? These are not just great iPhone cameras, they’re great cameras, period.

Rewind is a Mac app coming soon that promises to create a searchable, rewindable index of everything you read online, write in conversation, work on or even say in meetings.

We’ve all had this happen: you remember seeing something that you want to share, but you don’t remember where you saw it nor enough details to find it on the internet. Rewind promises to make everything that you’ve “seen, said or heard” searchable.

Sometimes, you need your iPhone and your Mac to be very different tools throughout the day — Focus modes are all about customizing them for everything you do.

Apple’s Focus modes are a powerful way to change how your iPhone, iPad and Mac look and feel whether you’re driving, sleeping, relaxing or working. It’s all about fully immersing yourself in whatever you’re doing. You can change all kinds of things: from who can reach you and which apps send notifications to custom lock screens, home screens and more.

After Apple began running new advertisements in the App Store on Tuesday, some developers checked their product pages to find banner ads for adult video chat apps, video poker apps and gambling apps of all varieties.

The fact that some of these advertisements appear on apps for children and apps for addiction recovery adds insult to injury. I asked a few independent developers to get their reaction to the news — and they were not happy.

Update (October 27): Apple has revised the types of ads that may appear, but the new ad placements remain.

Order tracking is a mess. You might get a tracking number with your online order, but you have to bring up the tracking history on the carrier’s website or plug it into an app. With iOS 16, Apple hopes to end this madness with order tracking right in the Wallet app. You can see all* of your orders and their progress** in one convenient*** spot.

Apple’s “Take Note” product blitz on Tuesday did not include any Mac news. Instead, iPad stole the spotlight: a new iPad Pro with M2, a new entry-level iPad that isn’t actually priced at the entry level, a new Magic Keyboard Folio and yet another lease on life for the original Apple Pencil (now with a dongle!). A surprise entry is a new Apple TV 4K at a lower price with a USB-C Siri Remote.

But according to Bloomberg, new Macs are “highly likely to launch before the calendar turns into 2023.” What can we expect soon — and what’s on the roadmap?

Email doesn’t often get new features. Sending an email still works basically the same as it has since the ’90s. But these days, people want modern features — like scheduling emails or undo send. In iOS 16, Apple brings a bunch of new features to the stock Mail app for the first time.

You can quickly take back an email if you forget to include an attachment, or schedule an important email way in advance. You also can get smart reminders to read email later, or alerts to send a follow-up. If you catch a typo right after sending an email, or if you want to send an invoice on a specific day and time, both features will soon be available.

Read on to see how it all works.

Apple’s modern keyboards are perfectly adequate but pretty unremarkable. They are anything but fun. But thanks to the wide selection of modern USB adapters from TinkerBOY, you can liven up your setup with long-lost keyboards and mice of yore.

You can use the legendary Apple Extended Keyboard II, with its unique key switches that make typing an almost ecstatic experience. You can get an adapter for the original Macintosh Mouse, for clicking and dragging like it’s 1984.

I get a fair share of products for review at Cult of Mac but none had me excitedly checking the mailbox every day like these. Read on for my experience using TinkerBOY’s keyboard and mouse adapters with a modern Mac.

The iPhone 14 Pro can take incredible 48-megapixel photos that capture eagle-eye details at incredibly high resolution. To take 48MP pictures, you need to shoot in Apple’s ProRAW format, which pairs the lossless RAW format preferred by professional photographers with the iPhone’s computational photography data.

This means that your iPhone 14 Pro is capturing all of the sensor data, and the results can be stunning — better than anything possible with any previous iPhone. (The iPhone 13 Pro captured ProRAW images, but only sported a 12MP camera.)

ProRAW captures images at 8064 × 6048 resolution. That means you can crop in really far on your pictures and keep everything pixel-perfect. You can print your images on a huge 26-inch by 20-inch poster, even at a professional-quality 300 DPI. The high-resolution images also give you more control during the editing process, so you can tweak your most important images to your heart’s content.

There are some caveats, though. Images with ProRAW enabled take up three times the storage space, for one. And shooting pictures like this takes a little longer. (The image capture isn’t as instantaneous as we’re used to.) And for everyday snapshots, ProRAW results might even be less satisfying than simply letting the iPhone perform its computational photography magic.

Read on to see how it all works so you can start taking 48MP photos with your iPhone 14 Pro, then edit them effectively.

Live Captions, in iOS 16, generate subtitles of any audio playing in any app on your iPhone. Powered by the Neural Engine in Apple’s custom silicon, the capability to turn words from music and/or videos into real-time text is a boon to many users, in many different situations.

If you’re hard of hearing, for instance, the ability to see instant captions on the screen is a game changer. Or, if you don’t have headphones when you’re sitting in bed late at night and your partner is asleep – or you’re in any situation where you don’t want to make noise, like on the bus or in an office – you can turn on Live Captions to get subtitles.

The applications are endless and exciting. Here’s how to use Live Captions in iOS 16.

Lockdown Mode is a new option in iOS 16 that limits system features for maximum security. Apple designed it to protect its products from sophisticated spyware, like NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, which has been used to target journalists, politicians, dissidents and activists around the world.

Spyware like Pegasus may seem like an unlikely threat. But for some, Lockdown Mode could be life or death. U.S. citizens need not worry at the moment, but it doesn’t take a wild imagination to picture how such spyware might be embraced by slightly more fascist administrations.

Right now, Lockdown Mode is meant for high-profile activists and journalists. And I mean real journalists — the kind who expose state secrets — not bloggers like me. Read on to find out how to enable Lockdown Mode and how it affects your device’s functionality.

Is it worth buying a full-size camera these days? The reasons to do so grow smaller and smaller as smartphone cameras get better and better. It’s getting to the point where you have to spend a thousand dollars or more for a full-frame camera to take noticeably better pictures than your iPhone.

Even then, a dedicated camera still won’t automatically sync your pictures to iCloud and might not tag your pictures with location data. And then you have to buy lenses — and full-size camera lenses are expensive.

What if, instead of buying a different camera, you could add lenses and accessories for your iPhone that fill in the missing gaps? You could get the same versatility with the same convenience.

New in iOS 16 is the ability to follow your favorite sporting pastime with My Sports. It allows you to get the latest scores, read coverage from newspapers and magazines, see scheduled games and watch highlights.

It works across multiple apps, including Apple News, Apple TV and others. You can follow teams from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NWSL, WNBA and MLS. It also includes college football and basketball. Here’s how to set it up.

iOS 16 brings a lot of exciting changes, but no one seems to like the new Search button on the Home Screen.

It can clutter your aesthetic theme, it’s easy to press accidentally, and it’s not any faster than using the swipe-down gesture for search. Luckily, it’s possible to turn it off — read on to see how.

Have you ever wanted to edit and unsend messages in iOS? Like when you texted your mom “Finally got laid today” when you meant to say “paid.”

Thankfully, with iOS 16 and Apple’s other upcoming OS upgrades, you can edit and unsend iMessages. Let me show you how this feature works.

At Apple’s ‘Far Out’ event, music lovers got a treat in the form of new AirPods Pro, Apple’s top wireless, noise-canceling earbuds — the first revision since their 2019 launch. The top-shelf buds keep the same design but gain support for personalized spatial audio, touch controls and precise location finding.

AirPods products are typically announced alongside new iPhones and Apple Watch models. Today was no exception, with their debut tying in with the new iPhone 14 and 14 Pro models, the new Apple Watch Series 8, SE and Ultra.

AirPods Pro 2 will be available for preorder on September 9 for a September 23 release date at $249.

One of the more surprising features in iOS 16 is the ability to cut out people from a picture (or a dog, a car, whatever’s in focus) and copy it into another app. You can send it in iMessage, paste it in a photo editing app, or use Universal Clipboard to paste it on a nearby iPad or Mac.

What’s it for? Well, it’s great for making stickers for WhatsApp and Snapchat, plus it’s a hell of a lot of fun. If you’re putting together a YouTube thumbnail or making memes, it can significantly cut down the time you spend precisely cutting out edges, but it’s by no means precise enough to use professionally.

Developer Mode is a security feature new to iOS 16. It will prevent unsigned code from running on your device — apps that are not on the App Store nor TestFlight. Most people can enjoy the added layer of security for free. But, this also means that if you’re writing your own apps in Xcode, you will need to enable Developer Mode before running your app on your iPhone or iPad.

Another reason you might turn on Developer Mode is to install AltStore, a popular open-source App Store alternative. With AltStore, you can easily run emulators for Nintendo games, a clipboard manager, Windows virtual machines and more.

Read on to see how to turn it on.

In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade being overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Facebook turning over a teenager’s private chats about her abortion to police, protecting your data is more urgent than ever.

Your iPhone and Apple Watch, and third-party apps you use on them, efficiently capture data that could be used against you at a later date by law enforcement. We’re talking things like location data, ovulation records, text messages and your web-browsing history.

Keeping all your data private after Roe v. Wade to avoid prosecution could prove highly important. Luckily, Apple gives you powerful controls over how and where your data is stored. You just might need to adjust certain settings for maximum privacy.

Read on to dive deep into data security recommendations for iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac.

In its entire 46-year history, Apple has made only one truly great keyboard: the Apple Extended Keyboard II. Dating from 1987, the Apple Extended Keyboard II has been dubbed “the greatest computer keyboard of all time.“

For me, the Extended Keyboard is the ultimate Goldilocks keyboard: it offers the perfect amount of travel, feel and sound. Alas, it was discontinued in 1994 and Apple hasn’t made a mechanical keyboard — with switches and springs beneath each key — since.

But fear not. The Matias Mini Tactile Pro keyboard is the Extended Keyboard’s spiritual successor: a modern mechanical keyboard in a mini package that plays nice with modern Macs.

But is it any good?